Rogue (video game)

This article is about the 1980s video game. For the 2014 game by Ubisoft, see Assassin's Creed Rogue.

Rogue
Designer(s)	Michael Toy Glenn Wichman Ken Arnold
Platforms	Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, Macintosh, TRS-80 CoCo, Unix, ZX Spectrum
Release date(s)	1980
Genre(s)	Roguelike
Mode(s)	Single-player

Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman around 1980. It was a favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, in part due to the procedural generation of game content. Rogue popularized dungeon crawling as a video game trope, leading others to develop a class of derivatives known collectively as "roguelikes". For example, it directly inspired Hack, which in turn led to NetHack. Roguelikes have since influenced commercial games outside the genre, such as Diablo.

Gameplay

In Rogue, the player assumes the typical role of an adventurer of early fantasy role-playing games. The game starts at the uppermost level of an unmapped dungeon with myriad monsters and treasures. The goal is to fight one's way to the bottom level, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (Rodney spelled backwards), then ascend to the surface. Until the Amulet is retrieved, the player cannot return to earlier levels. Monsters in the levels become progressively more difficult to defeat.

The game's setting was influenced by the text game Colossal Cave Adventure as well as Dungeons & Dragons, from which most of the monsters were, initially, closely modeled. Wichman has stated the monsters were soon altered "to avoid getting in trouble" with the creators of Dungeons & Dragons. The 8-bit version of Rogue produced by Mastertronic, however, has some of the same monsters as in D&D such as kobolds and rust monsters.

User interface

The "dungeon" as it looked on an IBM Color PC

The "dungeon" as it looked on an ASCII Terminal

In the original, all aspects of the game, including the dungeon, the player character, and monsters, are represented by letters and symbols. Monsters are represented by capital letters (such as Z for zombie), and as such there are twenty-six varieties. This type of display makes it appropriate for a non-graphical terminal. Rogue was one of the first widely used applications of the curses screen control library. Like most programs using this library, the game uses the termcap database to adapt to the capabilities of terminals made by different vendors. Later ports of Rogue apply extended character sets to the text user interface or replace it with graphical tiles.

The basic movement keys (h, left; j, down; k, up; and l, right) are the same as the cursor control keys in the vi editor. Other game actions also use single keystrokes—q to quaff a potion, w to wield a weapon, e to eat some food, etc. In the DOS version, the cursor keys specify movement, and the fast-move keys (H, J, K, and L) are supplanted by use of the scroll lock key.

Each dungeon level comprises a grid of three rooms by three rooms, or dead end hallways where rooms would be expected. Later levels include mazes in the place of rooms as well. Unlike most adventure games of the time, the dungeon layout and the placement of objects within are randomly generated.

Development

The original authors of Rogue were Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and then Ken Arnold. The earliest versions were written on the Unix system at UC Santa Cruz and later coding moved, along with Michael Toy, to UC Berkeley. The game became popular enough to be distributed with Version 4.2 of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) UNIX. Rogue was ported by Michael Toy and Jon Lane to the IBM PC in 1984, and then by Michael Toy to the Macintosh. Toy and Lane formed the company A.I. Design, which marketed these versions. According to Lane, Dennis Ritchie was quoted as saying that Rogue "wasted more CPU time than anything in history."

Later, marketing was handed over to established video game publisher Epyx, who contracted A.I. Design to port the game to Amiga, Atari ST and the TRS-80 Color personal computers.

In 1988, the budget software publisher Mastertronic released a commercial port of Rogue for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit and ZX Spectrum computers.

Numerous clones exist for modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Palm OS, Linux, BSD OSs and iOS. It is even included in the base distribution of NetBSD and DragonflyBSD.

• 

  4.3 BSD from the University of Wisconsin, circa 1987. Rogue is shown in "/usr/games"

• 

  4.3 BSD displaying the man page for Rogue

Automated play

Because the input and output of the original game is over a terminal interface, it is relatively easy in Unix to redirect output to another program. One such program, Rog-O-Matic, was developed in 1981 to play and win the game, by four graduate students in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh: Andrew Appel, Leonard Harney, Guy Jacobson and Michael Loren Mauldin.

In a test during a three-week period in 1983, Rog-O-Matic had a higher median score than any of the 15 top Rogue players at the Carnegie-Mellon University and, at the University of Texas at Austin, found the Amulet of Yendor in a passageway on the 26th level, continued on to the surface and emerged into the light of day.

Ken Arnold said that he liked to make "sure that every subsequent version of rogue had a new feature in it that broke Rogue-O-Matic." Nevertheless, it remains a noted study in expert system design and led to the development of other game-playing programs, typically called "borgs" or "bots". Some target roguelikes, in particular Angband.

Reception

Jerry Pournelle in March 1984 named Rogue for the IBM PC his "game of the month", describing it as "a real time trap. I found myself thinking 'just one more try' far too often". The game was reviewed in 1986 in Dragon #112 by Hartley and Pattie Lesser in the "Role of Computers" column. In a subsequent column, the reviewers gave the IBM and Mac versions of the game 3½ out of 5 stars. Compute! favorably reviewed Epyx's Amiga version as improving on the text-based original, stating that "the game will give you many hours of gaming fun". Rogue was named #6 on the "Ten Greatest PC Games Ever" list by PC World in 2009.

External links

• Rogue at MobyGames
• Rogue can be played for free in the browser at the Internet Archive
• Interview with Glenn Wichman at the Wayback Machine (archived January 31, 2008)
• The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Z's from Gamasutra by Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton
• Rogue 1984 – The DOS Game, the History, the Science
• Rogue Central @ coredumpcentral.org Information, documentation, screenshots, and various versions for download and online play.